Composition Multimedia Project - Brenda

by Brenda

In my project, I plan to address Chimamanda Adichie’s ideas she discusses in the TedTalk, “The Danger of a Single Story”. I will mainly focus on the importance of writing and reading, and how they lead to forming single stories. To Adichie, writing and reading was important to her at a very young age. Since she began to read at an early age, she developed single stories early on. In my project, I plan to incorporate what Adichie discovered through her reading. I chose to do my project about the ideas presented in Adichie’s work, because she shined a light on a topic I was not aware had a name. Therefore, I think it is important we spread Adichie’s ideas and learn more. Through her talk, she taught me the consequences single stories have and how much they impact people and places. Creating and sharing single stories can hurt people's dignity and create misunderstandings. I also decided to form my project around Adichie’s ideas as I feel it highlights another reason why reading and writing are so important. People form ideas and opinions based on what they are reading whether that be in books, reviews, or websites. It is important to be able to read multiple pieces of work and learn about people/ places to stop the idea of single stories. My project will include a painting of a girl reading who will represent a younger version of Adichie. I will incorporate the things Adichie mentioned she was reading about as a young child to visually picture what she mentioned in her talk. This represents a time in her life when she started developing single stories. I wanted to do a painting to get creative and visually allow the class to see one of the stories Adichie included in her talk. This background story was overall an important detail to her main idea regarding how dangerous single stories can be.  

Adichie’s talk starts off by giving us background information about her childhood and some insight on how she began to create single stories early on. She includes how she began to both read and write at a young age. Adichie starts off by saying “I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: all my characters were white and blue eyes, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was the sun had come out. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to” (00:45). In my painting this is exactly what I want to picture and allow the class to visually see, a young version of Adichie reading. She was reading and writing about stories which she could not connect to yet felt like she had to. Reading often opens up a new world and expands our imagination, especially as a young child learning about new things. She states, “because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things which I could not personally identify” (01:47). Adichie was reading literature which she could not connect with, it was making her believe she must be a certain way instead of finding her own cultural voice. Adichie had created a single story about writing, due to the fact she did not have access to a variety of books dealing with literature and cultures. In her talk, Adichie says the thoughts and ideas she developed from reading as a young child demonstrate “... how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children” (01:40). It is so easy to be made to believe something and only have that single idea towards it. This was what caused Adichie to create a single idea of how she thought writing had to be. One of the quotes that stood out to me was when Adichie said single stories make “our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar” (13:53). Single stories tend to point out the differences and only tell one part of the story, just like young Adichie’s books. This idea connects with my painting as I tried to capture a young girl reading about different things, things that are completely different from her.